Richard Giarusso is a versatile musician with practical and scholarly experience in a wide range of repertoire. After undergraduate study in music and English at Williams College, where he worked closely with Kenneth C. Roberts, he earned a PhD in historical musicology from Harvard University. His dissertation, Dramatic Slowness: Adagio Rhetoric in Late Nineteenth-Century Austro-German Music, was completed under the supervision of Reinhold Brinkmann. An article on the final songs of Schubert’s Winterreise is forthcoming from Ashgate Press. At Peabody, Dr. Giarusso teaches classes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. In addition to his scholarly work, he maintains an active career as singer throughout the northeast. He has studied voice with Keith Kibler, William Sharp, Pamela Dellal, and John Shirley-Quirk and has performed in master classes with Mitsuko Shirai, Hartmut Höll, and the late Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson. An experienced ensemble singer, he was a regular member and frequent soloist with the Choir of the Church of the Advent in Boston. In addition, he has appeared with Emmanuel Music (Boston) and currently sings with the Aoede Consort (Albany, NY), the Washington Bach Consort, and Chantry (both of Washington, DC). A specialist in the German lied, Dr. Giarusso is involved in a project with fortepianist Aaron Berkowitz to perform and record the Schubert song cycles with historical instruments. During the summer months, he serves as a member of the voice faculty at the Berkshire Choral Festival. Also trained as a conductor, he is the co-director and founder of Williamstown Early Music and The New Opera, both based in western Massachusetts. With these organizations, he has organized and conducted performances of Bach's St. John Passion, Schütz's Musikalische Exequien, Puccini's La Bohème, and all three Mozart/Da Ponte operas. In August, he will lead performances of Mozart’s Così fan tutte with the newly-formed Hubbard Hall Opera Theatre in Cambridge, New York.
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